"After Tony got hurt, I made this statement and I stand by it: I don't think Tony should play football anymore," Theismann said Thursday morning on 105.3 The Fan. "I care a lot about Tony Romo the man, the father, the husband. He's established himself. He has nothing to prove down in Dallas. A lot of guys leave this game without a ring. That's not the whole thing. You want to be able to walk away from the game."

Theismann said he considers Romo one of the toughest guys in the NFL after the handful of surgeries he's come back from.

Romo's latest injury was a compression fracture to his L1 vertebrae suffered during Dallas' third preseason game on Aug. 25. His recovery time was projected at 6-10 weeks.

"We're just talking about his back, but how fragile is his shoulder still?" Theismann wondered. "If he come back and plays, he's going to land on it. That's just the nature of our game. Something's gonna happen. What jumped out at me the night he got hurt was it looked like he was laboring trying to get away. And you can't be a sitting duck back there."

"I care for him as a guy who I don't want to see have something happen to his back so that he can't enjoy the rest of his life."

So what should be done?

"So I think that for me, you let him continue to rehab, you work hard because you're not going to be in a better facility with better trainers or better doctors that what Tony's going to get down there with the Cowboys," Theisman said.

"So you continue to improve, in your mind, 'I wanna play, I wanna play," but in the interest of Tony Romo, he should not play football again."

Theismann also touched on a few other topics with the station.

On Dak Prescott's debut:

Dak played really well against the Giants. I thought he played a really solid football game. But you still wound up losing the football game. So it's not just that one individual.

Emmitt Smith: What I saw from Ezekiel Elliott's debut; what Cowboys coaches can do to help RB succeed

Are Cowboys playing too conservative with Dak under center?

You can't say conservative, but you can only give someone so much at the early stages of a career. People don't appreciate the multiplicity and the speed and scheme of the game. It's entirely different. He looked entirely comfortable through the preseason. But there's four different stages of speed in the NFL, as I've seen it. You have the preseason, where everybody's very vanilla, trying to find out what's going on. People are thinking a lot, so they're not reaction. Then you get into the regular season, where now you get the starters, you get the speed, you get the athleticism. Then you move into the playoffs and you're playing a really good football team and it notches it up another level. Then you get to the Super Bowl and it takes it up another level. So the speed of the game, the decisions that have to be made, all those things factor into the four different process that you face through the leave. I think with Dak, they're gonna move along and [offensive coordinator] Scott [Linehan]'s gonna move them along in a way that he feels comfortable that he can get things done.

Looking ahead to Sunday vs. the Redskins:

I think the big thing about the Cowboys ... they've built one heck of an offensive line. It's tough to find a better offensive line in football than the Dallas Cowboys. Alfred Morris - we've very familiar with him here in Washington, great kid, great runner - and Ezekiel Elliott showed a lot of pop, a lot of speed and a lot of get-up-and-go. And the Redskins' Achilles heel the other night was stopping the run. So this could be a great challenge. And when you can run the football, you don't need 300 plays. You need three.

Who needs a win more?

I think when you look at where they both are, being that the Redskins are playing at home, I'd probably say the Redskins [need it more]. Because they're playing in front of their fans, they didn't play well against the Steelers. The expectations here were very, very high going into this season, and it was somewhat of a disappointing performance Monday night.